Page 163 of Sawyer

Pulling away from Sin, I turn to my friend, just as she steps into the light of the foyer. She looks awful but alive. “Violet!”

“Oh, thank the fates you are alive.” She grabs me in a fierce hug and drags me close. I can smell her scent of blood oranges, which wraps around me. “You’re alive.”

“I’m alive,” I sob. “I killed him.”

“Freddy? Good, he had that shit coming,” she mutters into my hair.

“No, Sal.”

“Good,” she repeats. “He had it coming.”

Even though I have the guys who reassured me that I saved myself, hearing it from Vee just hits differently.

“Sawyer?” a voice calls to me.

Pulling away from Violet, I see my brother leaning against the doorframe, beat to hell, and being held up by Rumor. I press my fingers to my lips, holding back a sob at seeing how beat up he is. “Shepard?”

“Sin, we need a medical mage.” Rumor hauls my brother to a chair and gently sits him down.

“On it.” Sin rushes from the room, and I don’t know whom to concentrate on—Vee, or my brother.

“Who else?” My voice shakes as I ask Rumor who else is down there, because Sal planned to kill off everyone I knew just to isolate me.

“Just this guy,” Bryn answers, half carrying my boss from Central Daily to another chair. “And Freddy, but he’s dead.”

Flashes of Sal slitting his neck take front and center, and my body shakes all over again. Violet reaches for me, dragging me close and just hugging me. “We’ve got this, superstar. We’re okay.”

I bury my face in her neck as sobs rack my body all over again.

I’m not okay. I’m anything but okay.

Rumor

“Have you contacted your family?” Bryn stares ahead at the garden sprouting with little buds in various colors. We’ve been sitting here for an hour now, just existing side by side. Somehow, in the last couple of weeks, he’s become my closest confidant and a chosen pack member—even though we haven’t made it official.

A sigh gusts from my lips. This…isn’t at all what I want to talk about. I want to focus on Sawyer, on her healing. We won’t push her, even though we had to negotiate her living arrangements. We didn’t want to force her to stay here, and we even drove her to her apartment, where she took one look at it, handed the keys to Violet, and walked right back out, shaking.

The trigger? Having to face the idea of being alone.

One of us has stuck by her side since we returned from Sin’s father’s mansion, which now sits vacant and desolate.

An entire month has passed—a month of the four of us just existing in each other’s space as we heal and get to know each other. It hasn’t been easy.

Sin is a neat freak, and Superman here leaves his socks on the floor, not to mention his wet towel on the end of the bed. I swear he sheds his clothing the moment he walks through the door to the little cottage.

We say nothing, though, because it reminds me that he’s here with us, choosing us, just as we choose him.

“No.” I rock back on the swing, letting my boot drag in the wet soil. “My mother and her pack are old-school.”

“Mine as well,” Bryn murmurs. “My mom was a broodmare, an omega who loved rotating through our large pack. I couldn’t even tell you how many siblings I have, only that I have at least six because she has six mates.”

“You don’t have a relationship with them?” I question, because it’s a similar circumstance with my own family.

“No.” He tilts his head to the side, his hair falling over his forehead. “Do you?”

“No. When they discovered I was a delta, they kind of forgot about me, which worked out just fine for me. My mother always told me that I’d find my family when I found my pack.” A snort spills from me at how ridiculous that is. “Yeah, I feel like you are more of a sibling than any of the siblings she carried, but I wish they’d nurtured that bond, even a little.”

“My parents pitted us alpha siblings against each other. They rewarded the winner and shunned the loser. It got to a point where none of us wanted their attention.” Bryn shakes his head, tilting it back to gaze at the early morning sky, where white clouds streak across a blue background. “Always fighting. Their old-school ways could have killed us.”

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